Vote yes for an aspirational Australian nation

The same compulsory voting that makes constitutional change so hard also works against US-style political party polarisation at general elections. But we are not immune from it. The culture wars around the Voice emerged from deeper political divisions in Australian society.

The two opposing pillars of last-century politics and parties are labour and capital, Labor and Liberal. The old left lost the economic class war because modern capitalism left the affluent post-war proletariat uninterested in the barricades. So new left thinking and the arc of history turned to other identity groups that had been treated unfairly, based on race, gender, sexuality, and in the heady 1960s youth movement, the young as well.

Cost of living crisis

In the 21st century, the establishment the hipsters despised tilts left. The long progressive march has gone through academia, media, culture and even boardrooms and much of the readership of The Australian Financial Review. Those cosmopolitan cultural thought leaders are set against a more conservative majority more concerned with practical life and their own communities than universal values. And as senior correspondent Jacob Greber reports in AFR Weekend’s Perspective section, that’s deeply underscored when there’s an inflationary cost of living crisis going on.

That means Labor has to straddle both the educated urban greenish left and the industrial working classes. The Liberals compete for working-class votes too, but have lost the affluent “teal”-shaded professional females who worry more about climate or gender than their finances. The Nationals no longer represent farmers, but the battlers in the bush. The flow of Yes and No votes in cosmopolitan and lower-income seats helps neither party: the Liberals seem further than ever from recapturing teal territory, leaving them to scrap for Labor’s lower-income voters, who heavily rejected Mr Albanese’s Voice.

The reshaping of Australia’s cultural and political map has left the political parties unmoored from the electorate, and that’s a huge concern for the future. Parties now struggle to win convincing majorities or claim mandates to do the heavy policy-lifting needed to sustain the prosperity that the great bulk of people still aspire to. For a decade, the parties could hardly keep a leader in place – never mind explain to voters how everyone will eventually benefit if there are reforms to taxation or workplace regulations even if some lose out at first. That’s the growth agenda that will generate the profits needed to sustain higher wages and the taxes to finance the caring services that voters want.

For all their complexities, most Australians would fall under the banner of an aspirational society based on the opportunity to prosper. That includes Indigenous Australians living in the parts of the country where disadvantage is most severe. As the Indigenous movement searches for direction and momentum after the failure of the Voice, the creation of a self-sustaining economic base for Indigenous communities, perhaps based on the native title that now exists over half the island continent’s land mass, could be a fitting new focus and ambition.